The Daily Express editor, Peter Hill, left the Press Complaints Commission board partly because of the row between Express Newspapers and the Newspaper Publishers Association, according to the chairman of the press watchdog.

Sir Christopher Meyer said the row, along with Express Newspapers' coverage of Madeleine McCann's disappearance, were factors in Hill's departure from the PCC, announced last week.

"There was a bunch of stuff. The Express Newspapers and the NPA had a row over payments, there was controversy over Madeleine McCann. Put all that together and it was time to rotate him out," Meyer added, speaking as the PCC unveiled its annual report for 2007 today.

In March the Daily Express, Daily Star, Sunday Express and Daily Star Sunday made front page and high court apologies and paid the McCann family £550,000 in damages over a string of false stories about the four-year-old's disappearance.

Despite the withdrawal of Richard Desmond's Express Newspapers from the NPA, whose members fund the PCC, the regulator will continue to hand down adjudications involving the company's four national titles.

Meyer also addressed the controversy over Nick Davies, the Guardian journalist who attacked the PCC when he launched his book Flat Earth News earlier this year.

Davies criticising the PCC, alleging that it only adjudicated and ruled on a tiny number of the complaints lodged with it.

"He was unable to read the statistics properly," Meyer said. "He failed to understand the statistics - he got them utterly wrong."

Meyer added that Davies used a global number of complaints to the PCC in his calculations.

This figure included complaints that the PCC has no jurisdiction over and were referred to other media regulators including the Advertising Standards Authority and Ofcom.

Releasing its annual report, the PCC said the number of complaints it fielded had soared by almost a third last year.

But the self-regulatory body claimed the rise as a victory for its increased visibility to the public.

The PCC said the headline rise in complaints in 2007, to 4,340, could also mask more meaningful statistics because many fell outside its remit and the overall total was inflated by multiple complaints.

Of those, the PCC ruled on 1,229 and reported a 347% increase in resolved complaints since 1996.

Meyer claimed the rise was further evidence that the PCC was succeeding in its mission to become more visible in the eyes of readers and making it easier for them to submit complaints.

The overall total was inflated by hundreds of complaints against a Tony Parsons column about the Portuguese police in light of the Madeleine McCann investigation and a Heat magazine sticker featuring Katie Price's disabled son.

Parsons' article in the Daily Mirror attracted a record 485 complaints from readers, although the PCC ruled that it did not breach its code of practice.

A separate complaint from the Portuguese ambassador was "resolved amicably".

The Heat sticker attracted 143 complaints, accusing the magazine of poking fun at Price's disabled son Harvey. The case was later resolved to Price's satisfaction.

Some critics have suggested that the rise in complaints is evidence of falling standards. Others point to the small percentage of cases that are actually formally adjudicated on - in 2007, 16 were upheld and 16 rejected.

Jeremy Dear, the general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, this week told MediaGuardian: "It takes a particular skill for spin for the PCC to proclaim the success of self-regulation in the face of sharp rises in complaints about media inaccuracy and falling public trust in journalism."

But Meyer said 2007 had been one of the most important years in the development of the PCC since its inception 17 years ago.

He added that he was "very much influenced by my time dealing with the press on the other side of the fence in the mid-1990s", referring to his spell as former prime minister John Major's press secretary.

"I think things were much worse then. If the figures are up by a third, the notion that press standards have slipped by 30% is ridiculous. It's much more to do with increased visibility," Meyer said.

For the first time, more complaints were received about stories that were read online than in print, according to the PCC annual report.

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